'This funding has been a lifeline': How your support is empowering curators
Read how your support has enabled the transformation of a contemporary art organisation and the professional development of a curator in an interview with Kiera Blakey, Director of New Contemporaries.
In 2024, Kiera Blakey received a Jonathan Ruffer curatorial grant from Art Fund when she had recently been appointed as Director at New Contemporaries, a leading arts organisation that supports the development of early career and emerging artists through a prestigious annual exhibition programme. She has previously held curatorial positions at the ICA, Camden Art Centre, Nottingham Contemporary and Art on the Underground.
We recently caught up with Kiera to hear about how this funding has supported her development as a curator and transformed New Contemporaries' strategy by enabling her to research the different experiences of being an artist in the UK today, while ensuring that the organisation is fit for the 21st century and beyond.
Art Fund: 2025 marks 75 years since New Contemporaries was founded. Tell us about it and how funding from Art Fund has supported this year's annual exhibition at the ICA.
Kiera Blakey: New Contemporaries was founded by and for artists. It’s a programme to support early career and emerging artists with opportunities to exhibit their work at high profile institutions around the UK. This year, we received around 2700 applications to be part of the programme selected by a panel of artists – Liz Johnson Artur, Permindar Kaur and Amalia Pica – for this special 75th edition of the exhibition at the ICA in London.
With funding from Art Fund, I travelled across the UK and Europe to talk to artists and visit a range of arts organisations to understand the concerns, challenges and needs they face so that we can ensure we’re supporting artists to the best of our abilities.
Through your research, what have you discovered about what it means to be an artist in the UK today?
We’ve found that being an artist in the UK today is both an act of resilience and a continuous negotiation of creative and economic challenges. Artists are navigating a rapidly shifting landscape shaped by funding cuts, the cost-of-living crisis, and diminishing access to affordable studio spaces. At the same time, they are engaging deeply with urgent social and political issues – from climate change and decolonisation to identity, technology, and mental health.
Many early career artists struggle with precarity, while balancing their creative practice with multiple jobs to sustain themselves. The traditional pathways into the arts are changing, with digital platforms offering new opportunities but also new challenges, such as visibility in an oversaturated space and the undervaluation of creative labour. Access and inclusivity remain critical concerns, with barriers still existing for those from underrepresented backgrounds.
On my research trips, I met with many incredible people and places, people working in spite of the challenges and delivering brilliant work. Emma Edmonson at TOMA in Southend-on-Sea is doing incredible work to support artists build sustainable careers; Hannah Wallis at Grand Union in Birmingham is rigorously thinking through access and accessibility; and Ahmet Öğüt, a Berlin-based ︎artist from Turkey, founded The Silent University, a programme for and with asylum seekers, refugees and migrants to give and take courses in contemporary galleries and museums, most notably at Tate Modern.
Your collaboration with Art on the Underground sounds really exciting. Can you tell us more?
Saved by the Whale’s Tail, Saved by Art by Ahmet Öğüt is a major public commission in partnership with Art on the Underground. The work explores the role art plays in everyday life and includes a call out to the public for stories that champion, interrogate and celebrate how art has saved lives.
Posters displayed across the entire London Underground network from 2 April 2025 will ask the public to submit their stories of how art has saved them to the New Contemporaries website. Submissions will then be reviewed by a judging panel, including the artist, and the winning entry judged the most compelling and original will have their story displayed alongside a new commission by Ahmet at Stratford Underground station in Autumn 2025.
The commission was initiated by a trip I made to meet Ahmet the artist in Rome, as part of my research trip funded by Art Fund. We were both visiting an independent art school and ended up doing a public talk together, then this commission was born.
What is on the horizon for New Contemporaries?
This funding has been an incredible opportunity for us to rethink the whole vision of the organisation and allowed us to develop many new incredible partnerships and opportunities for artists. As we approached our 75th anniversary, we wanted to interrogate what it means to make a space for artists and to do that, we needed to get out and talk to people, outside of our office ivory tower.
This has resulted in: the amazing forthcoming commission with Ahmet and Art on the Underground that will be seen across the whole of London; a new programme of partnerships with museums and galleries across the country that will benefit many artists and audiences; and importantly, a renewed direction and focus for the organisation, ensuring our future work is accessible and relevant to as broad a range of audiences and artists as possible.
And lastly, how has this funding supported your development as a curator?
This funding has been a lifeline – being a director can be lonely so it’s been amazing to be able to get out and talk to as many people as I could squeeze in! It gave me headspace and time to think about new work we’d like to do and I’m really excited about a new programme we’ve put together that will be free to join and open to any early career or emerging artist – watch this space!
